Tools Featured in this Teardown

Introduction

We don't break gadgets—we rip them apart with style. We tear them down, if you will. Today we put our spudgers up against Sony's PS Vita, the newest addition to their portable platform family. Join us as we go motherboard deep into Sony's newest device, and when we're done be sure to follow @ifixit on Twitter to stay up to date with the latest and greatest teardowns.

This teardown is not a repair guide. To repair your PlayStation Vita, use our service manual.

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The front holds the usual diamond of shape-coded buttons, a D-Pad, and two analog sticks. If that's not enough for you, don't forget the two bumper buttons, the three smaller buttons parked just below the analog sticks and, of course, the touchscreen.

The bottom side of the PS Vita is left relatively bare and is occupied by the charging port, headphone jack, and the memory card door.

The top of the PS Vita is adorned with the volume button, power button, game card slot, and an accessory slot.

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When we turn the Vita over, we are instantly thrilled to see a secret code!

It appears to be a cheat code. We postulate that pressing all of the action buttons in order, starting with the triangle and rotating clockwise -- roughly 410 times -- will give you unlimited lives, moneys, manas, likes, whatever!

Apparently the hidden cheat code does more than make your team in NFL Blitz 12 into a pack of running hotdogs. For the first time, this handheld device actually has a rear capacitive multi-touch pad. Curious how it could be used? Check out this demonstration!

Above the rear touchpad lies the first camera ever seen in a handheld PlayStation device.

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It's time to play "Which card will work in my PS Vita?"! We'll give you a hint: it's the one labeled "Sony PS Vita."

Don't be fooled by the size and shape of the PS Vita's memory card. While it looks similar to the microSD cards surrounding it, there is no cross compatibility. That's right, if you want more memory, you've got to buy Sony's proprietary cards.

The same rule applies to the game cards. They look similar to SD cards, but the pinouts and shape differ in such a way that makes cross-compatibility impossible. Sorry hackers.

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Once the back case is off, components start flying out of the PS Vita faster than you can say "thirsty bag."

The speakers come out without much fuss thanks in part to their pressure contacts. These types of connections are common in devices where space is a concern and there's no room for routing and soldering speaker wires.

With many modes of connectivity comes a whole bundle of antennas. Head-to-head gaming sure has come a long way.

A bit late to the party, but I'd guess it was bonded with some kind of LOCA (Liquid Optically Clear Adhesive) glue. It's also used in mobile phones to stick LCD to front glass.

If so it's possible to stick them back together, you can find both LOCA glue and LOCA dissolver (if you want to try and replace only front glass so you need to clean LCD from old glue) on ebay. There's also thin (very thin) wire that used to cut through original glue and separate screen from glass on mobile phones. Heat the screen with heat gun, lift glass a bit, get wire in and slowly heat and cut.

But luckily my vita is still OK so I don't have to test all of these theories :D

That's not a repair guide, but a teardown, doing this teardown may not result towards what you were looking for, sometimes it leads to being unbale to reassemble the hardware, there should be a PlayStation Repair Guide hidden somewhere.

Resources

Repairability

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